The PS2 released more than a year later in Japan, and while only a few months after the DC in North America, but straddling the holiday season, so essentially the following year. But the announcement seriously gimped the DC launch.
I love the Dreamcast, own multiple, started hacking with KallistiOS back in the day, it has much more significance to me than the PS2, but it’s just not the case that the hardware was vastly superior. It’s no slouch, there are aspects that are better. The GPU had some neat tricks and more VRAM+HWTC was nice, you get better image quality, but it was plainly bested in most of the metrics that mattered more, geometry, lighting and fill rate, and most people did not use VGA out at the time. The “Emotion Engine” is absolutely ungainly compared to the elegance of the SH-4 simply tied to the PowerVR and AICA, but you simply can get more out of it both in raw FP/SIMD (geometry) and DMA. Simplicity of architecture doesn’t matter to the vast majority of gamers.
Some of the early titles looked like shit due to the difficulty of leveraging the hardware, but look at the longevity and late stage PS2 games (especially Konami), quite beyond DC capabilities. And a DVD was objectively superior to GDROM (and it made a good movie player).
The Xbox was released after Sega already shitcanned the Dreamcast, its fate was sealed before.
Sony overstated the PS2 capabilities, but it did have DVD drive and the graphics were better after developer learned how to use it, it had strong franchises and simply more S tier ones. The Dreamcast was too arcade port heavy. The Dreamcast simply got fucked in the winner take all market at the time. Maybe if they released in 1998 with a larger library they might have had enough run way.
I love the Dreamcast, own multiple, started hacking with KallistiOS back in the day, it has much more significance to me than the PS2, but it’s just not the case that the hardware was vastly superior. It’s no slouch, there are aspects that are better. The GPU had some neat tricks and more VRAM+HWTC was nice, you get better image quality, but it was plainly bested in most of the metrics that mattered more, geometry, lighting and fill rate, and most people did not use VGA out at the time. The “Emotion Engine” is absolutely ungainly compared to the elegance of the SH-4 simply tied to the PowerVR and AICA, but you simply can get more out of it both in raw FP/SIMD (geometry) and DMA. Simplicity of architecture doesn’t matter to the vast majority of gamers. Some of the early titles looked like shit due to the difficulty of leveraging the hardware, but look at the longevity and late stage PS2 games (especially Konami), quite beyond DC capabilities. And a DVD was objectively superior to GDROM (and it made a good movie player).
The Xbox was released after Sega already shitcanned the Dreamcast, its fate was sealed before.
Sony overstated the PS2 capabilities, but it did have DVD drive and the graphics were better after developer learned how to use it, it had strong franchises and simply more S tier ones. The Dreamcast was too arcade port heavy. The Dreamcast simply got fucked in the winner take all market at the time. Maybe if they released in 1998 with a larger library they might have had enough run way.